


Happily Ever After

by all_these_ghosts



Category: The X-Files
Genre: AU, Episode: s07e11 Closure, F/M, Maybe angst, Maybe fluff, season 7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-07 23:20:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8820328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/all_these_ghosts/pseuds/all_these_ghosts
Summary: She’s tried over the years to imagine what he would be like if he’d grown up alongside Samantha, if they’d argued over curfews and chores, if they’d formed a united front against their parents. But it’s impossible to separate the Mulder she knows from the loss of his sister, so she never entertains those thoughts for long. A Fox Mulder who’d grown up alongside his sister would almost certainly be a happier man, but just as certainly, he wouldn’t be hers.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Eternal gratitude always to the [Inside the X transcripts](http://www.insidethex.co.uk), from whom the first chunk is taken.

* * *

__**SCULLY:** Arbutus Ray?  
**WOMAN:** Yes.  
**SCULLY:** Are you the same Arbutus Ray that worked as a nurse at the Dominic Savio Memorial Hospital in 1979?  
**WOMAN:** Yes, I'm she.  
**SCULLY:** I'd like to ask you about a patient you treated. A fourteen-year-old girl.

* * *

“I’m so sorry,” Arbutus says, shaking her head. “It was such a long time ago…”

Scully hands over the file. “Maybe this will jog your memory,” she says. She glances back at the car, where Mulder is listening attentively.

The older woman flips through the pages, and suddenly her face clears. “Oh my goodness.”

“You remember her?” Scully asks.

Their eyes meet. “Of course,” Arbutus says, giving the file back to Scully. “This is my daughter, Georgia.”

Scully pointedly does not look back at her partner. Her head starts spinning; suddenly it’s hard to speak. “I’m sorry?” she manages.

“It’s how Georgie came to be with me,” Arbutus says patiently. “She was a patient at the hospital for a few days, and when she was released, she came home with me. It was meant to be temporary, but no one ever came looking for her, and she’d never say where she came from. It made the adoption paperwork complicated.”

Scully still can’t quite believe what she’s hearing. “Ma’am, are you _entirely_ certain that this—“

Now Arbutus is clearly offended. “Of course I’m certain,” she snaps. “I’ve seen her nearly every day for the last twenty years, haven’t I?”

“I’m sorry, it’s just that—“

"You said you're with the FBI,” the woman says, interrupting her. “Georgie’s not--there's no trouble?”

Mulder’s walking up behind her. His shoes crunch on the dead leaves.

"No trouble, ma'am," Scully says, glancing back at her partner. His face spells trouble, though. He’s hovering behind her like a shadow. "Would it be all right if we came in?"

The woman hesitates but steps aside, pushes the screen door open. “Sure. But Georgie’s not home, she—“

“Where is she?” Mulder asks hoarsely.

“She’s at class. She’s going back to school to become a nurse, like me.” Arbutus puffs up a little at this. “Georgie’s been a secretary for years, but now that her daughter’s older, she’s got the time to study.”

 _Her daughter._ Scully files this away and steps into the woman’s home, Mulder right on her heels.

It’s a pretty little house, simple and neat. The furniture is mismatched but deliberately so, a collection of items procured over time rather than a mish-mosh of hand-me-downs and cast-offs. Arbutus gestures for the two of them to sit down and they do, side-by-side on an old-fashioned upholstered sofa.

“Well then,” Arbutus says, settling into an armchair, “tell me what brings the FBI to my door at such an odd time of night.”

Scully looks over to her partner. He looks suddenly young, sitting there folded up on this stranger’s sofa. She wants to brush the hair out of his eyes, she wants to take his hand; something to remind him that she’s here.

“Your daughter, Georgia,” Mulder says suddenly, and he’d been looking at the floor but now he’s staring right at Arbutus Ray. “She’s my sister.”

The woman gapes at him.

“I’m sorry,” Scully cuts in, shaking her head at Mulder’s impatience, “I know this is unorthodox—“

Mulder pulls out his wallet. Behind his driver’s license is a school picture of Samantha, wearing two neat braids and a collared shirt. He hands it over to Arbutus.

The woman looks at the picture, then back up at Mulder, then over at the wall. Scully hadn’t noticed it until now, but it’s covered in photographs of Samantha. Pictures of her as a teenager, pictures of her with Arbutus at the Grand Canyon and on Fisherman’s Wharf. Pictures of her with friends, and with people who must be aunts and uncles and grandparents. Pictures of her with a little girl, also dark-hared, with fine, familiar features. Proof of life.

“How did you get this,” Arbutus whispers. The photo shakes in her unsteady hands.

“I told you,” Mulder says, sounding almost desperate. “She’s my sister. She…disappeared when she was eight years old.”

“She remembered a brother,” Arbutus says slowly. Her eyes are trained on the wall of photographs. “She…when she first came into the hospital, she was so afraid that she never even told us her name, and she had the strangest wounds we’d ever seen. She couldn’t tell us anything about her family, except that she thought she had an older brother with brown hair. We tried to find out where she came from, but without a name…”

Mulder’s just staring at her.

She continues, “They did awful things to her, whoever took her. So I never knew…how much she’d truly forgotten, or how much she’d repressed.”

“And she — she lives here now?”

Arbutus nods. “She was married for a few years, but her husband passed away. Georgie and Lauren moved back in with me after. Lauren was just a baby when it happened.”

“How old is she now?” Mulder asks.

“Lauren? Just turned eight. Sweet child.” She narrows her eyes, shakes her head. “You’re really Georgie’s brother?”

He nods.

“She’ll want to meet you.”

“I hope so,” he says quietly.

Scully is struck by the older woman’s innocence. If it were her, she’d be asking a thousand questions — asking for proof, inwardly plotting to secret Samantha away just in case this man wasn’t who he said he was. Even before she started working on the X-files Scully was wary, suspicious; the world had made her that way. Arbutus’s openness is a welcome surprise. Despite harboring a Consortium runaway for two decades, this woman has never had to learn fear.

And then they hear the _click_ of a key in the door, and they all turn around at the same time.

A slim brunette enters, and her eyes dart around the room. “Mom?” she says, her voice high. “Mom, what’s—“

Mulder stands up suddenly and Scully wants to tell him to stop, he’s going to make her nervous — but the young woman’s eyes settle on him, curiosity and concern at war in her expression.

Samantha’s journal is in Mulder’s hand; he must have had it in his pocket. Her gaze zeroes in on it and she goes pale. “How did you get that?”

Scully can see the panic in the young woman’s eyes. She’s gotten good at spotting fear. “Sit down,” she tells him, and he immediately complies. Scully turns away from him to address the woman. She’s standing behind her mother now, her hands resting on the back of the armchair. “Ma’am, we’ve been investigating the disappearance of a girl named Samantha Mulder. She was taken from her home in 1973.”

“It’s been almost thirty years,” the woman says. Scully can see how badly she wants to back out of the room, but she stands straight and faces them anyway. Some of that Mulder fortitude. “Why would you be looking for her now?”

Scully glances at her partner. Mulder’s face is colorless, his eyes wide; in a flash she sees a reflection of the boy he must have been. Desperate and terrified and still so full of hope. 

It’s always the hope that gets her.

“He never stopped looking for you,” Scully says softly. “He’s been looking since the day you were taken.”

Georgia — Samantha? — takes a step in their direction. Her shoulders relax. “You’re the boy.” It’s not a question. “You’re the boy I remember.”

He doesn’t move. Like if he does, he’ll startle her away.

“You used to hide my dolls in the attic because I was too scared to go up there,” she says, her voice distant, like she’s reaching for a memory half-formed. “You cut my hair once while I was asleep.”

Mulder’s jaw clenches, unclenches. “I’m sorry,” he says, rasping. “I wish that I—“

“When Mom and Dad fought you’d come into my room,” she says, cutting him off. “You’d tell stories to distract me.”

He nods, slowly.

“You had a stupid name. The kids at school used to make fun of you, and you hated it.”

Silently, Mulder passes her his badge. She looks at it. “Fox,” she says, her voice sparkling with laughter. “Yeah, that would do it.”

“I’ve looked everywhere,” he says. Scully watches him watching her. In seven years by his side she’s never seen him look like this.

“Not everywhere,” Samantha says. She hands the badge back to him. There’s a crooked smile on her face that makes Scully ache, it’s so familiar. “I’ve been here the whole time.”

Arbutus’s eyes are misty; her hands clasped on her lap as though in prayer. And now all of Mulder’s prayers have been answered.

Samantha is the one who reaches out first, and Mulder holds her tight. Scully can hear the low murmur of their voices blurring into white noise.

Feeling suddenly like an intruder, Scully excuses herself from the room, then sneaks out through a back door in the kitchen. In the yard there are a few chairs stacked up against the wall and covered with a tarp, and a little swing set. She sits down on a swing, letting her feet hang. The wind is strong. Tonight it feels like it could send her anywhere.

From out here the house is golden. It looks like one of those paintings at the mall, with the lit-up skies and glowing cottage windows. They’re tacky and awful and her mother loves them, and right now Scully feels like she could be the next Thomas Kinkade if she could just capture this image.

But then she’d have to look closer, and she doesn’t really want to.

Mulder has his sister back, but what has ever been returned to her? She hates herself for resenting him. He’s been searching for so long; he deserves this. Some kind of grace.

Samantha. After all these years. With a life, a family, a daughter. Mulder’s world gets bigger while Scully’s keeps contracting.

She’s tried over the years to imagine what he would be like if he’d grown up alongside Samantha, if they’d argued over curfews and chores, if they’d formed a united front against their parents. But it’s impossible to separate the Mulder she knows from the loss of his sister, so she never entertains those thoughts for long. A Fox Mulder who’d grown up alongside his sister would almost certainly be a happier man, but just as certainly, he wouldn’t be hers.

What is he without the loneliness at his core? What are _they_ without it?

After a while, the back door opens again. “Scully?” Mulder calls, and then he sees her. “Hey,” he says, coming to sit on the swing next to hers. He doesn’t even hesitate, doesn’t question for a second whether or not it’ll hold his weight. “Thought you left.”

“I thought about it,” she admits, “but then you wouldn’t have a way to get back.”

There’s a new warmth to his gaze. “Are you okay?”

“I should be asking you that question.” Scully pauses. “Where’s Samantha?”

“Inside. Talking to her mother.”

She doesn’t want to say it. “What if it’s a trick?”

“I don’t think it is, Scully.”

“I know that. But we’ve been fooled before.” She struggles to get the rest of the words out. “Mulder…they want to tame you. Maybe they’ve figured out a way.”

“Scully…”

“I don’t want you to get hurt again.” Over the years they’ve seen a parade of Samanthas, young and old, green-blooded or red, and all of them impossible. Even if this one seems real, well, they all did at first.

He takes her hand, his thumb lightly stroking her wrist. In this gesture she hears _I know_ and something like _Thank you_ , though of course thumbs are always less precise than language.

She wants to say _I’m in love with you_ , but tonight isn’t about her and what she wants. She wants to say _I’m happy for you_ , because she is — _she is_ — but she doesn’t.

Instead she asks, “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” he says honestly. “Part of me wants to stay as far away from her as possible so no one else figures it out. Part of me wants to bring her home, but…”

She hears it, even if he doesn’t say it out loud. _But our mother is dead_. Dead and just buried, and she knows the wound is still fresh. What is there to bring her home to? “Did you tell her?”

He shakes his head. “She hasn’t asked.”

They wobble on their swings in the blustery night. On the wooden frame above them, a heart and the name _Georgia_ , carved deep.

Scully was a girl once, too; remembers writing her own name alongside a boy’s on a Denny’s bathroom stall. The Sharpie had gotten all over her hands, and Melissa had rolled her eyes. “That’s how you get caught, dumbass,” she’d said. “Be more careful next time.” And for weeks after that she noticed Melissa’s name all over the place; scissor-carved on a desk in homeroom, scrawled with Sharpie under a chair in the school library and in another stall at that Denny’s. Of course she always wrote her name by itself: _Melissa was here_ , not _Dana loves Jacob._

Something permanent. Her sister carving her name all over San Diego. _Melissa was here._

 _And she was_ , Scully reminds herself. These days she’d write the same thing, claim her own existence in the strongest possible terms. She thinks about going back to San Diego, to the place where she remembers her sister best. She’d find Melissa’s name on the wall in some diner and add her own next to it.

_Dana is still here._

“The others didn’t remember,” Mulder says after a while. “Not the way she does. She knows things that…” His voice trails off, leaving her to fill in the gaps with what little she knows of his childhood. After all these years, some parts of him are still a mystery. “Why didn’t they find her?”

“She ran far enough away.” She thinks about it. “Or maybe they just don’t care.” And wouldn’t that be a special kind of cruelty: to let Mulder spend his life thinking he was unearthing some vast conspiracy with his baby sister at the heart, only to learn that she never really mattered at all.

He sighs and digs his heels in the dirt, propelling the swing forward. All under his own motion. Maybe they’ve pushed each other enough. He swings, long legs awkward at the bottom of the arc, and she watches him go higher. The wood above them creaks, but it doesn’t bow.

And then he suddenly stops, planting his feet on the ground. The chains try to finish their arc, but his weight stops them. All the laws of physics are still in force. For some reason this surprises her. Mulder turns to look at her. “What if it _is_ real?”

Scully steels herself. “Then you have your sister back.” She refuses to break eye contact. “And then…you have some choices to make.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can stop,” she says simply, like it costs her nothing to say it. “This is what you’ve been searching for all these years. If you want, you can build a different kind of life.” She swallows, and it feels sharp. “You have everything you want.”

His gaze is, as always, unflinching. “Not everything.”

She looks away, gripping the chains so hard her knuckles turn white.

“You’ve been here the whole time. You’ve followed me all…” He swallows audibly. “I’ve never thanked you.”

“You don’t have to thank me, Mulder.”

“Right. It’s your job.” There’s just a little bit of an edge to his tone, and this is what she was afraid of. 

“It’s more than that,” she admits, quietly. “You know it’s more than that.”

“Look at me.” His voice is quiet, too, but insistent. She sets her jaw in refusal, but his fingertips are gentle when they reach out to her, turning her face toward him. “Scully,” he says. “Five years ago.”

She shuts her eyes tight. This isn’t profiling, it’s mind-reading, and she resents it every time.

“I chose you then, Scully,” he says, and when she blinks her eyes open they sting. “I thought it was Samantha, that I was giving her up, but I couldn’t — already I couldn’t let anything happen to you.”

“I didn’t ask you to do that,” she whispers. “I never would.”

He bites his lip, shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. It’s you, every time. Don’t you know that? And everything we’ve worked for, the X-files…it’s bigger than Samantha. It has been for years, Scully, ever since they — ever since they took you.”

“If it’s really her…”

“Then I have a sister who’s alive instead of missing,” Mulder says. “It doesn’t change anything else. I’m not going to stop looking for the truth. I wouldn’t know how to stop.”

They look at each other. The porch light comes on, casting them both in stark white, their shadows long. 

“Even if I get my sister back, they stole thirty years,” he says roughly. “And they took my father and your sister and your…they’ve taken so much from you. From both of us.” Sometimes she forgets that her baby would have been his, too. She doesn’t let herself think about what that might’ve meant. His eyes are dark, laser-focused on her. “This isn’t the end, Scully.”

The back door opens. “Fox?” a voice calls. There are other voices behind them, one older and one much younger, loud and excited.

Mulder keeps looking at Scully, steady.

“Go,” she says, waving him off. “Get to know your sister. And your niece.” Another brown-haired eight-year-old girl. Maybe they can keep this one safe. She should call Bill and Tara. It would be good if Matthew knew Aunt Dana as more than a signature on birthday and Christmas cards.

“Come with me.” He stands up, giving her that little half-smile. “You’ve followed me this far. Gotta see it through.”

She stays where she is, tries to figure out how to make him understand. “Mulder, this won’t happen for me. My sister will always be dead. I’ll never have a child of my own and I can’t — I can’t change that.” She swallows. “I don’t get a storybook ending.”

Mulder shrugs. “No one does. This,” he gestures toward the house, “won’t be easy either.”

“So we just…keep working.” Keep fighting. The future stretches out before them. Samantha is back. Maybe anything is possible.

“What else?” He pulls her up. Together they walk toward the warmth and the open door, his arm around her shoulders. “Come on, Scully. Let’s go find our something ever after.”


End file.
